II

I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Some brilliant correspondence between two writers published in the American Scholar pointed me to the work of Jame Salter. And this resulted in me slowly reading (because Salter's work can't be absolutely speed read) his novel on a marriage (and food, and cities, and the sea, and trees,...etc etc) "Light Years" over the past two weeks.

I loved it so much that I went out and bought Salter's more famous novel "A Sport & A Pastime", which is providing it's own delights. What one revels most in Salter's novels, is the density of descriptions of the surfaces, and how suddenly one is taken down below this river to a dark vein of truth.

Few underlined sentence from "Light Years":

"It took a long time, it took forever; days and nights, the smell of antiseptic, the hush of rubber wheels. This frail engine, we think, and yet what murder is needed to take it down. The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task."

"-any two people when they separate, it’s like splitting a log. The pieces aren’t even. One of them contains the core."

Here is an old NYT essay Salter wrote on writing...read, and then go seek Salter's novels out (E, you in particular should carry Salter to Turkey)

After a night of rain Half of these long avenues Are in shadow

And the foolish heart At the bottom of sleep's Stairwell keeps waking

To Adrienne's footfalls Vanishing, vanishing Into a summer's blaze

Of a life cleaved from A day where it once was, And thus desired to be always:

This first day of summer.